robcat2075

Smokin'! How long before someone gets it down to a minute?

Hey, I remember that one! That's a cute one. Good movie making.

there is preroll for particles but not for cloth AFAIK However you dont' have to render every frame cloth is in , you can render the one frame you like by setting your render range when you go to render. You DO have to let a cloth simulation run long enough for cloth to settle into the place you want it. So you will have "animation" in your chor... the cloth settles into place... but you only have to render the frame at the end that you like if that's all you need.

How about if you go ahead and let the center CP get selected when you are doing the weighting on that side, then go back and fix the weight on that center CP individually?

I just did some cloth yesterday in v16 and didn't see anything odd. Can you post a test PRJ with something odd?

Good looking test! I'd suggest more "drag" to the cloth to make it less flippy and tone down that head nod.

I like that vantage point!

You can't say you're just a kid anymore, welcome to 21 and up!

ouch! looking forward to next installment!

I bet you could use Luuk's AMTrak to mocap the puppeting... put some markers on your hand and shoot that.

Good looking trailer!

I interpreted the dark slash on the picture as the surface suddenly sloping so you'd need a spline at the start and end of the slope which is what the two blue lines attempted to stake out. I could be judging that entirely wrong. I probably am. However, you need to know that shape before you model it or you'll never know when you've got it. You might look up more, clearer reference pics. Or perhaps you have that bow?

You always make great characters!

you're making me dizzy.

It has something to do with the hook that is in the middle of that spline. Try selecting the points you want from another angle, with the lasso tool and make sure not to include the end of the hook.

Since the camera will always be seeing from the same angle, some props could be flat cards.

That's a great object for extruding. A great object for spline modeling. Roger is on the right track by suggesting extruding and I think you can do the whole thing with extrusion. For the hand grip portion, study the shape closely and know what the cross section shapes are. Start with the shape at eh bottom of the handle. I bet 8 or maybe even just 4 CPs could shape it. then extrude that once and reshape the new loop to match the shape of the cross section at the next major land mark. then extrude again to the next part. Just giving it a quick look I'd think the major spline rings might land where I've marked in blue, basically where ever the contour starts changing again.

Also... the biggest reason to animate in the chor is that you can see how the camera sees your animation. That's all the audience will see and you need to look good for that viewpoint.

possibly this is a permissions thing? Did you install as Administrator?

I think what you needed to do was save the master0.lic file before you wiped out that last install. I hope you still have it somewhere. In the trash?

Remember that PRJs only contain links to their images. I f you put the images in a zip with the PRJ we'll get it all.

We'd have to see you do it but my first guess is you have doubled splines of some sort.

First rule: keep it small enough to do. As much as there is to know, i still think A:M is the best platform for solo CG animation artists. I have Maya and it comes with a book of beginner tuts about 3x as thick as TaoA:M but after you finish it all you've done is make some boxes, a flying saucer, a jointed robot and a blob with an eye. Everything you do seems to take twice as many steps as it would in A:M.

When people were inventing CG animation they probably thought the tricks and shortcuts of 2D would transfer well, but unfortunately they don't hold up. There's something about the preciseness of CG that makes exact repetition more painfully obvious than in hand drawn animation. Extreme repetition was pretty rare in fine animation anyway, it was TV limited animation that sort of got us to accept the notion of characters just walking and walking and walking while they talked. Think of all the walking and talking scenes in Scooby Doo. If you consider well-done animated features like Disney was doing in the 90's they just don't have shots like that. They're stories are more visual so the need for characters to deliver long verbal dialogs ( and yet appear to be not completely still) is greatly reduced. That's a good candidate. That too. Actions like that made the parade scene in TWO possible. Ken Heslip created an action for the leg motion that was used on all teh band members and then created upper body actions for each of the instruments they played. Mark created actions for the bystanders too. Crowd scenes are a good venue for actions. To make the band members less robotic many of them are offset by a frame or two from their neighbors. that helped loosen it up a bit.

Yes. Almost all.